Hello from Gregg C Levine
About wscons, I'm afraid I can't help you there. About the hassles with rk0,
I might. As far as I know, the BBA is indeed wearing a RealTek chipset. It
also happens that chipset, and the NICs which wear them, are accident prone,
in the Linux/Windows worlds. I don't know about the NetBSD world. Also
support for anything RealTek based, is scarce. A suggestion is to check the
configuration of the settings for NFS, and DHCP. Obviously they are correct
because the system is coming up, but your problems say otherwise, also see
if you can build a 128M swapfile. Since I am now convinced that swapping
over NFS can be done, despite my information to the contrary, that might
solve your problems.
Gregg C Levine drwho8@worldnet.att.net
"Oh my!" The Second Doctor's nearly favorite phrase.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Josh Tolbert" <hemi@scoundrelz.net>
To: <port-dreamcast@netbsd.org>
Sent: Saturday, August 31, 2002 10:59 PM
Subject: rtk0 and swap space problems, along with a question about wscons


> Hi port-dreamcast,
> I'm trying to sup current allsrc on the Dreamcast to see if the
> Dreamcast can build a world and kernel for itself. I'm running in to two
> problems:
>
> 1) with a 32M NFS-backed swap file, the machine would use all of it's RAM,
> almost 30M of the swap, crash and reboot. I couldn't see what the error
> message was, nor is there anything in the logs. I suspect the Dreamcast
> just used up all available memory during the first part of sup (requesting
> changes). I worked around the problem by creating a 64M swap file. The
> Dreamcast finishes the requesting changes portion of sup, but there's
> other problems.
>
> 2) Aug 31 21:31:39 dreamcast /netbsd: rtk0: transmit underrun; new
> threshold: 320 bytes
> Aug 31 21:35:17 dreamcast /netbsd: nfs server
> 192.168.0.21:/mnt/exports/dc: not responding
> Aug 31 21:39:08 dreamcast /netbsd: nfs server
> 192.168.0.21:/mnt/exports/dcswap/swap: not responding
> Aug 31 21:39:08 dreamcast /netbsd: nfs server
> 192.168.0.21:/mnt/exports/dc: is alive again
> Aug 31 21:39:08 dreamcast /netbsd: nfs server
> 192.168.0.21:/mnt/exports/dcswap/swap: is alive again
>
> Those transmit underrun/new threshold messages make me nervous. The fact
> that I lost / and swap NFS shares really makes me nervous. Are the two
> missing shares a result of the rtk0 message? The spacing seems to be a
> pattern; rtk0 changes the threshold, about four minutes later
> /mnt/exports/dc goes away, and about four minutes after that swap goes
> away, both of which return apparently as soon as network traffic dies off.
> There's nothing in the nfs/dhcpd server's logs about network errors or the
> like. The nfs/dhcpd NetBSD machine has an Intel Pro/100+ NIC.
> Is the Realtek network hardware choking? It appears to be. Is
> there a workaround or anything I can do? Someone get Intel to make some
> BBAs. :)
> Now, wscons...How do we get it to work? Is it strictly a hardware
> driver problem, or is there something inherent to wscons that specifically
> precludes support for the PowerVR2 video hardware in the Dreamcast? I've
> been poking around in #linuxdc on irc.openprojects.net and they apparently
> have a good framebuffer driver for this video hardware (among other things
> that our port currently lacks). Is the problem just a lack of time for
> someone to get wscons to play nice with the PowerVR2? If that's the case,
> how would one get started with adding this support to wscons? I don't have
> a lot of C programming experience, but I'm damn stubborn and willing to
> give it a try.
> I'm guessing the main problem with hardware support for
> NetBSD/dreamcast is time.
>
> Thanks,
> Josh
>
> ------     ---   -
> Josh Tolbert
> hemi@scoundrelz.net
>
> Every time the power flickers, a squirrel gets his wings.
>
>